2 Thessalonians chapter 1 and we'll
just read a few verses from the beginning of chapter 1. Paul and Silvanus and Timotheus
unto the church of the Thessalonians in God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ grace unto you and peace from God our Father and
the Lord Jesus Christ. We are bound to thank God always
for you, brethren, as it is meat because that your faith groweth
exceedingly and the charity of every one of you all toward each
other aboundeth. So that we ourselves glory in
you in the churches of God for your patience and faith in all
your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure. Amen. May the Lord bless to us this
reading from his word. A couple of months ago, we spent
some weeks thinking about Paul's first epistle to the Thessalonians. And you may recall some of those
studies. You might remember that we said
at the beginning of that little series that we thought that it
might have been Paul's very first epistle. The first letter to
the Thessalonians was his very first epistle that he wrote of
the 13 or 14 that we have in our New Testament. You may also
recall that that epistle was occasioned by the return of Timothy
with the good news that the Thessalonian church was doing well. Paul had
had to leave Thessalonica during a time of persecution. And that
persecution continued and Paul, anxious to know of the condition
of the church, sent Timothy back to Thessalonica to see how things
were progressing. And Timothy had returned, said
to Paul that things were going well, and throughout the first
letter we learn a number of things that the Apostle spoke to the
Thessalonians about. And despite the trials that they
were experiencing, Paul used that first epistle for the opportunity
to correct a number of errors also that had crept into the
fellowship. This second epistle now that
we're going to look at over the next few weeks, if the Lord will
graciously allow, was probably written shortly after the first
one. In fact, it may be only a few
months between these two epistles and We can't be absolutely sure
about that, but there are some indications that that's the case.
And it would appear that one of the reasons for writing this
epistle was that part of the news, or the apostle had received
news, that part of the message of that first epistle had been
misunderstood by the Thessalonians. And that especially with reference
to the second coming of Christ. The Thessalonians had deduced,
either just through a mistake or perhaps they were wrongly
directed in their thinking, but they had deduced from Paul's
words that the day of Christ or the return of Christ was imminent,
it was at hand. and that Christ's coming was
just about to happen and consequently they were failing to care for
their families and to manage their affairs properly. And what
we'll discover is that Paul corrects that wrong thinking almost immediately
as he gets into this epistle and chapter 2 verses 1 to 12
will deal with this mistake that had arisen in Thessalonica. And Paul tells the people that
what must first take place is something he calls the apostasy. The apostasy would arise first
before the Lord Jesus Christ came back. And we're going to
come back to that in a few weeks, God willing, when we look at
chapter two. Just to think about the opening
introduction today, the epistle opens with Paul's usual greeting. And because of familiarity, we
ought not to pass over it for that reason. So what we're going
to do now is just restrict ourself to these opening four verses
and We learn from them in verse one that Sylvanus, or Silas as
he is sometimes called, it's the same person, and Timothy
are still together with Paul. And that's actually one of the
reasons why this epistle is thought to have been, or the two epistles
are thought to have been written close together. Because here,
Silas and Timothy and Paul are still together in the same place,
in Corinth. And we also notice that there
is a close connection in the apostle's mind between being
a church, he addresses this to the church of the Thessalonians,
there's a close connection in the mind of the apostle between
being a church or part of the spiritual body of Christ and
union with God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. So what
makes a church a church is this union with God the Father and
the Lord Jesus Christ. And I want to just touch on that
briefly because many groups and organisations take the name church. You go to any town, you go to
any city and you will find buildings, you will find congregations,
you will find activities that all take place under the umbrella
of the name church. But what makes a church is the
spiritual fellowship of believers with one another and with the
divine persons. That is the litmus test, if you
like, for what a church is. Spiritual fellowship amongst
believers and with the divine persons. And let me make clear
a personal application of this. Our little fellowship here today,
our little fellowship on the Lord's day might not be a church
in the normally understood way of personally and physically
meeting in a building, but we are a church nonetheless and
we are part of the church, the church of the Lord Jesus Christ
We are a church just as surely as the believers at Thessalonica
were a church because we are united in Christ, we are united
with one another and we share worship of God and the ministry
of the gospel. This is the body of believers
that the Lord has blessed us with and we receive his good
provision just as fully as did the churches of the apostolic
age and all true churches ever since. I don't want you thinking
that you don't have a proper church because you don't get
into your car on a Sunday morning. We are the Church of the Lord
Jesus Christ and we are blessed under mutual fellowship, love,
care and the common salvation which we have found in the Gospel
of Jesus Christ. The Apostle teaches these brethren
that they have union with God the Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ And we might just pause on that for a moment and ask
ourselves, how is it possible that mortal men and women, fallen
creatures, sinful people, can have union with God, who is spiritual
and who is holy? We are bound by time and space. Our God is eternal. Well, we can have union with
God, certainly not because of anything that we have done or
we have earned or accomplished in ourselves. If that were the
case, we'd have grounds for pride before God. But it is not the
case. On the contrary, Paul tells the
Thessalonians, and thereby he tells us, that we are a church
in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, because we have
received grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ. We are the Lord's people because
of what we have been freely given. and because of the grace of God.
We are united in Christ by grace. We are reconciled to God by the
substitutionary death of our Saviour. And this grace and peace
that the Apostle speaks about here is ground zero for believers. It is where salvation begins
in our doctrine and in our experience. It is the foundation of all hope
and comfort that we have. All we have by way of Christian
faith and spiritual hope is founded on God's everlasting love, manifested
in his good will towards us and our just acceptance by Christ's
death. Let me bind all that that I've
just said together in a few Bible verses because Paul says exactly
that to the Romans in chapter 5. He says this, God commendeth
his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died
for us. much more than being now justified
by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if,
while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death
of his Son, much more being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. And not only so, but we also
joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received
the atonement. You see, all we have all our
experience, all our understanding comes by God's goodness, by God's
gift and grace and it is conveyed to us spiritually because of
what Jesus Christ has accomplished on the cross. So that when the
apostle speaks of grace and peace as he does in every introduction
to his epistles that he writes as the apostle speaks of grace
and peace. He is speaking as the Thessalonians
knew about the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ on
our behalf. Substitutionary atonement was
the gospel Paul preached and it was the message that he had
preached amongst the Thessalonians when he had been with them. So
Paul tells us in Romans chapter 11 verse 6 that grace, the grace
and peace that he has been talking about, or the gospel message
of substitutionary atonement, grace is the heart of our relationship
with God. And of necessity, works are excluded
from that. Grace and works, says Paul in
Romans 11, are mutually exclusive. If what we receive from God is
based in any way upon works, it's not of grace. If it is of
grace, which we believe it is, then it can have no element or
component of creature works in it. And this is why Paul goes
on to say here in verse three, and let us just notice this,
because I think this is such an important point. He goes on
to say in verse three, we are bound to thank God always for
you, brethren, as it is meet, or as it is appropriate. It's
appropriate, indeed, we are bound to thank God always for you. Paul thanked God for the grace
that he saw in the lives of the Thessalonians and he traced that
transformation of character that was evidenced in the Thessalonians'
lives to the grace of God. Let me say it like this, Paul
didn't praise the Thessalonians for their faith. He thanked God
for it because Paul knew that anything and everything of a
spiritual nature in a believer must be traced and tracked back
to its origin. The grace of God. The grace of
God in Christ by which we are justified and reconciled to him. Grace and peace. So Paul begins
all his epistles in the same way, thanking God for God's grace
and peace in the lives of the believers to whom he is writing.
Thanking God for placing in the heart and experience of his people
the transforming and converting grace that makes a man and a
woman what they never could be otherwise. And it's why we too, Sunday after
Sunday, Tuesday after Tuesday, repeat, repeat, repeat again
and again the gospel message of God's everlasting love and
efficacious grace. It is God who has made us what
we are by the death of his son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Speaking of these spiritual matters,
Paul asks the believers in Corinth, who made thee to differ from
another? And what hast thou that thou
didst not receive? So we must always trace our spiritual
life to God's mercy and grace, because so long as we live in
this flesh, it will be the only solid ground of hope and comfort
in our fight with the old man. The faith in believing and the
love in the fellowship which the Thessalonians possessed for
one another bore witness. It was the manifestation of the
work of grace in their lives. It bore witness to God's grace
and set them apart as men and women upon whom the divine pleasure
had settled. It was evident to Paul, as it
was evident to all the churches who heard about the Thessalonians
and witnessed the trials of the Thessalonians, that God's grace
was upon these people. Paul talks of it as the patience
and faith in all your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure. The patience and faith in all
your persecutions and tribulations that ye endure. Let me just say,
I'm about to wrap this up now, but let me just say, I don't
think that these were arbitrary evidences. And what I mean by
that is this. Patience and faith under persecution
and tribulation appear to me to be characteristic of the testimony
of God's people in all ages. Is that not what we've been thinking
about in Isaiah? Is that not the experience that
we see when we look at church history? Is that not the experience
that we have in our own lives? That we are called to evidence
patience and faith under persecution and tribulation. You ask me what
characterises a believer more than any other trait and I would
say patience in persecution, faith in tribulation. And that's
not to disparage the other fruit of the spirit, love, joy, peace. But that long suffering is something
that we are all subject to. These two are perhaps the two
that most contradict the natural man within us and therefore most
display the grace of God in us. Paul gloried in the Thessalonians,
not because he'd been instrumental in bringing them to a knowledge
of the Lord, although he had, but because the fame and reputation
of their faithfulness in trial was both a testimony to the grace
of God and a blessing to other believers and churches who witnessed
it. So too, As the Lord's people
suffer today, patiently and faithfully, we trust God's wisdom and we
don't doubt his love. We exhibit true faith in our
hearts and God's grace in our lives. So may the Lord be pleased
to teach us by the example of these Thessalonians, these brethren,
more of his grace and peace. and something of the evidences
of true faith in persevering in the face of our own trials
and our own tribulations. Amen.